They are both Conservative politicians and both Etonians of the same vintage, yet they are almost permanently at odds. Would it not be better for the party to have coalition-government leader David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson singing from the same hymn sheet? Could it even be achieved?

Politicians’ nicknames are always good indicators of popular opinion. Margaret Thatcher became “Maggie” early in her premiership, possibly to counteract the vicious “Thatcher the Milk Snatcher” moniker. While the left spat out the word “Maggie” with hatred, her supporters used it to denote affection and support. “Maggie” was a woman of the people as well as the hated icon of the fight against statist socialism.

Coming to the two Etonians, we can see the difference: “Dave” is a dismissive reaction to Cameron’s attempts to present himself as an ordinary bloke, while “Boris” or even “BoJo” have an air of amusement and acceptance about them.

“Though Boris and David fixed their eyes on political careers from an early stage, they developed differently.”

Apart from appearance and mannerisms, David Cameron and Boris Johnson share a vaguely conservative outlook, though Boris presents himself as being more on the right, more euro-skeptic, considerably more pro-business and therefore less statist. But the distinctions are not great except in occasional rhetorical outbursts.

They also share a political ruthlessness and determination to rise “to the top of the greasy pole” (to quote that great Conservative Benjamin Disraeli). Cameron succeeded in becoming party leader and Prime Minister, but he failed to win the expected electoral victory in May 2010. Johnson has actually won an election and is politically ascendant. But London’s mayor does not have as much power as New York’s. Squeezed between Westminster—which regulates his power—and the boroughs that will yield as little as possible of theirs, the mayor can rarely achieve anything specific. But he has a big budget and a great possibility of patronage. Being in City Hall (irreverently known as the Great Glass Egg) provides one with a power base independent of party leadership. Boris has used that position to criticize, often indirectly, certain of the coalition government’s policies. He has called for greater support for the city and for London’s concerns regarding immigration. Neither he nor Cameron has much say over immigration as it is under the EU’s purview, but the appearance is one of Boris standing up for London and the city against his own leadership if necessary. With a little finesse this could be hailed as an almost Churchillian position.

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An even greater difference between the two is their professional experience. Though Boris and David fixed their eyes on political careers from an early stage, they developed differently. Cameron is notoriously one of a growing group of politicians whose experience is limited to politics. His only job not directly connected with the Conservative Party involved doing little more than political PR at the now-defunct Carlton Communications. Boris, on the other hand, was a reasonably successful journalist, his career culminating as the Spectator’s editor. He has written books and appeared on TV in various programs. None of it is very far from politics, but it gives an impression of a life and a career that have gone beyond Cameron’s.

The biggest difference between these two politically powerful Etonians is their image. Cameron tries very hard to pretend that he is not what he is: the offspring of a privileged family who has received an expensive education. This awkward attitude gets him into trouble. Few people relish being told that money is not that important by someone who has never remotely known what it feels like having to scrimp. He exudes an atmosphere of old-fashioned paternalistic Toryism, which is popular with very few people these days and is ill-suited to a man of his age and apparent lack of experience.

In contrast, Boris approaches life with the attitude that most people expect from Etonians. He is not ashamed of his background, his family, or his education. He is going to make the best of it. This appeals to most people. Johnson’s demeanor sends the message that you can achieve many things by playing to your own strengths. The class warriors who do not like it are unlikely to vote for him anyway, so they do not enter into his calculations. Boris’s original image of a foolish blond toff has long ago been dispelled. What remains is a reasonably attractive, very smart, and very determined politician who may have ideas that appeal to people. How strong that will make his position in the future battle for the Conservative Party’s soul depends on whether he’s reelected in May.

Whatever happens then, the chances of there being anything but a temporary truce between the two Etonians are nonexistent.

The omens were bad from the beginning. The day after the IOC awarded the 2012 Olympics to London and while Mayor Ken Livingstone’s bidding team was celebrating in Singapore, four bombs exploded on London Transport. It reduced much of London’s activity to a standstill. Mayor Livingstone could not get back in time to do his imitation of Rudy Giuliani, who actually was in London and could do his own imitations.

From then until the most recent bad news—Olympic mascots are being produced under Chinese slave-labor conditions—the enterprise has been dogged with as much ill fate as other Olympic projects. Those of us who have been arguing that this was a very bad idea, an expensive pharaonic project that will indenture us for decades, have been proved right over and over again.

“Why not have future Olympic Games in the same place every four years, as the ancient Greeks were supposed to have done?”

The explosions of 7/7 and the failed explosions of 7/21 suddenly reminded the government of the difficulties in mounting proper security at the Olympic Games. The original derisory estimate for security has now risen to £1 billion, according to a recent article in the Evening Standard, which admitted this reluctantly, as it has become a flag-waver and drumbeater for the Olympics. Prime Minister David Cameron was soon chiding those Moaning Minnies who would not support the wonderful opportunity that the Olympic Games will bring to London by pointing out that the presence of many multinational CEOs would bring in £1 billion immediately. He did not explain how that was going to happen.

As projected expenses doubled and tripled, as arguments unspooled between various personalities and organizations, as more of London’s streets were slowly dug up for works allegedly related to “London 2012,” it became obvious that other slogans had to be produced to retain support.

The Olympics were pronounced to be wide-open and inclusive as well as an instrument to revive sport. But the Olympic Games are hardly inclusive. They are open only to the highest, fastest, longest, and strongest, despite the introduction of such preposterous “sports” as beach volleyball in Trafalgar Square. Sporting activity has remained stubbornly unrevived, pursued by those who would have done so anyway. It would have been more sensible to spend a very small part of the money on new playing fields for children.

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When that failed we were given two arguments, both risible. The first was that it would bring more tourists to London. The second was that it would create a wonderful heritage.

London does not need more tourists, as it is overrun by them most of the year. Past experience of cities that held Olympics shows there is subsequently a fall in the tourist numbers and these may not recover, as Athens found out even before the recent financial crisis. The various tourist quangos answer that they knew London would be different. Apparently not. Late last year the same quangos told us that projected hotel bookings for the summer of 2012 were significantly lower than in previous years. Whatever may happen during the actual Games, the Olympic curse already seems to be striking London.

The notion of creating some sort of heritage is even more ridiculous, especially since no one has ever been able to define it. Halfway through last year Steve Norris, former MP, former mayoral candidate, and someone involved through various quangos with the Olympic project, was still trying to whip up support by robustly proclaiming that the Games will have to leave some sort of a heritage to England. This, despite the fact that other countries who hosted the Games found themselves deeply in debt, often with specially built structures that have become derelict.

As predicted, the jobs that the whole project was going to bring to a high-unemployment area have been taken by all and sundry outside that area, since nobody bothered to examine why there was high unemployment there in the first place. The so-called Zil lanes designed to rapidly carry all those who are connected with the Olympic Games through London are causing enough discontent for Chairman of the British Olympic Association Lord Moynihan to announce that he would be using public transportation. This provoked another outcry: Given that London Transport has expressed doubts it would be able to cope with the large influx of visitors for the Games—and given its general track record—the idea of grandees huffing and puffing on the Tube is not heartening. Canary Wharf, an area that brings in daily profits, will be severely inconvenienced, with people who work there wondering if they would be able to use the Tube’s Jubilee Line.

The whole enterprise carries an unforgivable amount of expense, inconvenience, and pointlessness, especially since its primary aim seems to be creating a grandiose project to glorify politicians. If we must have Olympic Games at all, it is time to end their peripatetic nature, which adds to the unbearable expense and the outrageous corruption. Why not have future Olympic Games in the same place every four years, as the ancient Greeks were supposed to have done? The obvious place would be Athens—on condition that they raise the money for the Games themselves.

Demography’s specter is haunting Europe, where low native birthrates and aging populations pose serious questions about national economies and their apparently indispensable social welfare. Birthrates in some European countries are under replacement levels. Others have either zero or low growth.

Europe’s aging population supposedly means that an ever decreasing segment will be economically active; that ever more welfare will be eaten up by an ever larger part and provided by an ever smaller part; that the health service will be unbearably burdened and charities will struggle, especially since so many of them are relying on state funds.

But is an aging population necessarily a tragedy?

“People view the fact that they will have to work longer as a major disaster, but what is a fair retirement age these days?”

More people are living longer, surviving previously fatal or debilitating diseases, and keeping their marbles longer. The real tragedy lies in social, political, and economic attitudes that have not kept pace with medical developments. Britain and other European countries have ongoing rows around raising the age at which people can claim their state pensions. People view the fact that they will have to work longer as a major disaster, but what is a fair retirement age these days?

The retirement age was fixed after World War II when conditions were very different. Average life expectancy was far lower, work for most people was physically much harder, and medicine could cope with far fewer diseases. It made sense to assume that people would retire at 60 or 65, take it easy for their few remaining years, then die without feeling any material need.

Trade unions and NGO-type charities attained their strongest positions in the decades after World War II. They are not likely to give up any ground without struggle. (Many charities provide important services to those who really need them. It’s just that those people are not likely to need them so much in their sixties—let alone their fifties, as the British charity Age Concern would have it—but in their eighties, and soon in their nineties.)

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People can and should go on working longer. Being underutilized for a couple of decades while their physical and mental abilities remain strong and their experience is valuable would be poisonously destructive. Is there any reason, beyond the fact that they are often cheaper, why firms should not hire older workers, who are likely to be reliable and experienced? That would dispose of several “problems” the aging population supposedly creates. Society’s wealth-generating section would not shrink and the welfare-claiming sections would not continue swelling, at least not because of old age. One suspects there would be fewer medical “problems” if people over 60 or 65 did not feel that they were good for nothing but the scrap heap.

P. D. James recently wrote a new novel at age 90. Despite a debilitating disease, Stephen Hawking is still intellectually active at 71. Many quite aged House of Lords members work harder and make better legislative contributions than the youngsters so beloved by our political leaders. They are not freaks of nature; they are normal examples of an aging population.

Finding new work for the old would mean rethinking many assumptions—some decades old, some centuries. But given that people are living longer, fewer children are being born, and European social welfare is economically unsustainable, such a rethinking is long overdue. The one possible difficulty is that in the process, many people—hitherto well paid in bureaucracies, trade unions, and NGOs—might find themselves on that scrap heap.

On the Monday after the Russian Duma election, thousands gathered in Moscow and other cities to protest election fraud that was so blatant, even many formerly sympathetic Western observers noted it. Arrests were carried out with surprising mildness while many around the world watched events filmed and uploaded by amateurs.

Just before 4AM in Moscow, news went around that political activist Alexey Navalny had “disappeared.” He’d been arrested and taken to an out-of-the-way police station in Izmailovo, where he was allowed to issue one Tweet and was then held incommunicado. He was supposed to then be transported to Kitay-gorod police station. Somewhere between the two he apparently vanished for a couple of hours while near-panic ensued among his followers. Eventually he “reappeared” in the right police station.

Navalny was given 15 days in detention for resisting police in carrying out their duties. So he was not there physically at the large meeting that gathered in Moscow on December 10, but a statement he’d written was read aloud to the 50 thousand or so protesters. He urged people to keep fighting and said Putin’s henchmen cannot arrest and beat up hundreds of thousands. His message was that we are not animals nor slaves, and we have had enough.

“They are still speaking out in public and to the media, though Russia’s once and future president has made it clear that he is displeased with them.”

Given the weather and the fact that previous protests had been broken up violently, the numbers and the courage are impressive. They are still speaking out in public and to the media, though Russia’s once and future president has made it clear that he is displeased with them.

Putin and his acolytes have over the years managed to exert almost total control over the traditional media. The little that remains outside their immediate influence can be frightened at any time by a notice of unpaid taxes. There is not a firm in Russia unaware of what happens when the government decides that back taxes are owed.

So the ability to oppose the regime and the crony capitalism that supports it has fallen on the bloggers, among whom Navalny is possibly the best known. His blog directs angry and accurate accusations at corrupt large businesses that all have strong links with the state apparatus. He is thus a leading figure in the public anger at the Russian system’s corruption and criminality.

Vladimir Putin’s appeal was that he had apparently restored order in the country after the chaos of the Yeltsin years. The good luck of high oil and gas prices made everyday life for most Russians better than in living memory. Putin had also promised to restore Russia’s status as a great power. In exchange for such prosperity, most Russians seemed prepared to overlook ever-increasing authoritarianism.

Russia has not become a great power that everyone fears. The war in Georgia showed up Russia’s military inadequacy. Estonia and other Baltic states have consistently defied “big brother.” When Russia told NATO not to attack Libya because they would oppose it, NATO effectively replied, “You and whose army?”

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More importantly, the economic upturn has not lasted. A good deal of the new wealth that was created has been siphoned off by the new oligarchs, the officials, Mr. Putin’s mates. Opposition parties have been suppressed, candidates have not been allowed to stand, and meetings have been dispersed violently. Law and order are a joke. Corruption and violence are rife.

Putin has announced that there will be no investigation and that troubles have been stirred up by the Americans, who clearly bribed all those tens of thousands who turned out on a freezing-cold day to protest.

But Putin underrated his opposition. It is organized and tech-savvy. Protest meetings this time around were arranged with social media and mobile phones.

Trying to present a more modern, Western image than Putin’s crude macho posturing, President Medvedev posted on Facebook that he intended to investigate electoral fraud. Facebook’s faceless hordes shouted him down.

The Russian government has been involved in social media for quite some time. Anybody who has posted about Russia in the West knows of the ill-written and boringly repetitive comments that flood in whenever a piece goes up that is critical of Putin’s regime.

There’s an aimless bewilderment in the government’s reaction to post-election events. Somebody clearly prevailed on Putin not to order the toughest possible responses. There are reports of some sympathy among the police, though there are also reports of them saying that they know these people are enemy agents because the Boss told them so.

Many Russians still believe the old chestnut about it being the Americans’ fault. But a growing segment—one that participates in social media both foreign and domestic—will be difficult to control. Their dissatisfaction will spread and their ability to organize themselves (hitherto the government’s preserve) will be admired and emulated. Mr. Putin does not have long to control a situation with which he seems ill-equipped to deal. Presidential elections are due in March, traditionally a month of Russian uprisings and revolts.

As predicted, United Russia lost ground in Sunday’s Duma elections. In fact, they did worse than expected, and observers inside and outside the country say they would have done even worse if the election had been run fairly and honestly. United Russia will have 238 seats, the Communists 92, Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats 56, and the supposedly Social-Democrat “A Just Russia” 64.

All parties except for United Russia have threatened to file legal complaints, regardless of whether or not they performed well. There are reports of opposition websites being hacked as well as more traditional methods such as multiple voting and intimidation.

The Duma elections reflected Russian attitudes more than next year’s presidential elections will. Mr. Putin, now prime minister and president-to-be, is not going to lose. There will be no serious candidates against him and if anyone tries to stand, reasons will be found why he or she cannot be registered, cannot hold public meetings, and cannot be in the media. On Election Day, voting stations will be carefully monitored and voters will be told that their vote counts—in their lives and careers as well as those of their families. Even for the Duma elections the only party aside from United Russia given the green light was the Communist, on the mistaken assumption that people would not vote for them. In fact, Reuters and other media outlets described all the opposition parties that did better than expected on Sunday as left-wing. But there is no explanation as to how they might be to the left of United Russia, which has proved to be authoritarian, corrupt, and a believer in what it calls sovereign democracy, otherwise known as state control.

“The world refuses to see Russia as the victim.”

The mantra in the West for years has been that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s once and future president and its present prime minister, is immensely popular in the country. To prove this, United Russia has organized a youth movement, encouraged pop songs about the man, and smiled benevolently at hysterical fan mail that allegedly came from women of all ages. Questions as to why a supposedly popular leader and party need to ban all non-supportive demonstrations, beat up small groups that meet in opposition, and block serious presidential candidates are brushed aside.

The war in the Caucasus has had considerably less coverage under Putin than under Yeltsin. Putin’s government appeared to be just the sort of forceful presence the country needed after the chaos and sudden fall in living standards that weren’t so high in the first place. He imposed order on the tax system and control on the highly unpopular “oligarchs” who had close links with many of the so-called democratic politicians. He presided over a rise in living standards. Anyone who knows the country and remembers what it has been like in the last twenty or thirty years can attest that until very recently, life was considerably better for more people in Russia than it had been in living memory. That counts for a lot, but not forever. As people adjust their expectations they raise them ever higher and become more unruly when there is a fall. Recent economic problems have produced the sort of uncertainty that was endemic under Yeltsin: high unemployment in many parts of the country and displays of incompetence that verge on criminal. Last winter a Moscow airport became a complete shambles. Large areas around the capital had no power during the coldest period. Ships were stuck in the ice for days on end. And those were only the stories that the media reported.

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At the same time, Russia’s vaunted strengthening in foreign affairs, something that is important to many Russians distressed by the apparent destruction of their supposedly once-great country, has become less obvious. When Russia took on tiny Estonia over the question of the Red Army memorial statue, Estonia won despite the bullying and the cyber attacks. Estonia’s population is a little over one million.

The war in the Caucasus continues, with periodic irruption of terrorists into the rest of Russia, leading to catastrophic results and no inquiries when things go wrong—as they always do. The world refuses to see Russia as the victim. UN statements about the Middle East and North Africa and threats to the West are routinely ignored. Russia’s military is seen as a shameful joke despite the amount of money that was supposedly pumped into it. But as always, the money seems to have disappeared. The country’s general corruption and lawlessness—with politicians, businessmen, journalists, and human-rights activists murdered, beaten up, and threatened—are widely accepted by Russians who mostly shrug their shoulders while sighing stoically. But they can no longer pretend that this is normal, or that these are the birth pangs of a new and better society, or that Russia is really superior to the West. Too many people travel abroad and stay abroad. Too many people have access to the Internet and can thus bypass the government-controlled media.

The media (and, in turn, the people) can dismiss Western criticism of such episodes as lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s suspected murder while in police custody as “Russophobia.” What cannot be dismissed is the farcical and humiliating situation in which two people toss the presidency and premiership back and forth between them.

Whatever reason caused people to vote overwhelmingly for Vladimir Putin and his party in the past—genuine popularity, fear, or the lack of alternatives—all that is now changing. The people are becoming fractious.

In most of its manifestations, the detective story is a modern morality tale with the heroes of good battling the forces of evil. The detective story is the conservative literary genre par excellence, which is why it has appealed for decades to readers across the world.

The genre’s critics say its conservatism is tied to an outdated, class-ridden structure as well as a reluctance to embrace modern ideas or left-wing points of view (loosely referred to as “social justice”).

Consider what happens in a detective story, even a modern one that purports to have a leftward (or “enlightened”) leaning: A crime, probably murder, is committed, possibly followed by similar crimes. The world is turned upside-down as a result. Together with the detective, we cannot rest until the perpetrators are discovered and brought to justice. The perpetrator is at the very least prevented from repeating the crime. Human life is sacrosanct. Murder is wrong, no matter how you look at it. It is the ultimate crime. It destroys nature’s balance, which can be restored only by the culprit’s discovery and his or her punishment. In a century that saw the casual elimination of millions of people, this highly moral attitude became and remained attractive to many people. This has continued into the new century, which has not started off too well.

“The detective story is the conservative literary genre par excellence, which is why it has appealed for decades to readers across the world.”

Dame Agatha Christie knew there is evil in all of us that we must control but sometimes cannot. Modern detective stories and thrillers try to ignore this by somehow assuming that nobody with the right—or, rather, left-wing—point of view can be a criminal and if they are, it is somebody else’s fault. These are aberrations. In the genre as a whole, anybody can be a killer for any conceivable reason, just as anybody can lie, cheat, or steal. What prevents most of us from doing so is our ethical understanding and the social structures that have been built on that.

There have been stories of Nazi concentration-camp inmates performing Christie’s plays. Her books were read whenever possible in communist countries. It is not only the attractive, orderly, cozy world she describes that appeals to many—it’s the assumption of human fallibility. When you read her books carefully you realize the world is not all that cozy and violence can intrude at any time. Anyone can be a criminal, she says, but no criminal must be permitted to get away with it. This underpins all detective stories, which even in their more violent modern versions remain the most moral of all genres.

The Sherlock Holmes stories have followers in every part of the world and were avidly read in the Soviet Union. They spread an admirably fascinating message in a society that denied there is a definite right and wrong: Crime is not to be tolerated, order is an accepted form of life that must be restored when it is broken, and the police are not all-powerful but subject to the same rules as the rest of us.

P. D. James, considered by some to be the modern Queen of Crime, once caused a stir for emphasizing the detective story’s moral and conservative underpinnings. The media twisted her words to mean that she did not think any interesting crime could happen on a council estate and that the latter’s denizens did not have enough moral understanding to be of any value to a detective-story writer. She said that for crime and detection to be interesting, there had to be a moral understanding first. Where this happened did not matter, but mindless violence did not interest her. It had to be an orderly society broken up for her to investigate the crime and its consequences.

The millions of detective-story readers understand this. They may want a good page-turner or they may want to see a wrongdoer punished. But mostly they want to lose themselves in a modern morality tale, which is conservative by definition.